The best of all earthly drinks (Waiter, waiter, percolator)

Thanks, Enterprise Mfg Co

So, I like to focus my effort for maximum impact (this is my new way of saying 'lazy') and therefore although we have not one, but two, hand grinders, we usually just buy ground coffee. Since it's not espresso we're making, the ultimate freshness of just-ground beans doesn't seem to matter quite so much. Also, laz- I mean focus.

But I have at last seen the ultimate coffee mill, at the Beatty Museum. Machines of this type date to the 1870s - this one may be later, as Beatty didn't really take off til the early 1900s. It would probably have been used in a mercantile store, of course.

Probably will not work for camping. Guess we'll keep buying ground beans for now.

Our camp coffee pot has been mentioned in dispatches already. Made by the legendary (in Sweden, anyway) Berggren, maker of beautiful things, it's a vintage enamelled percolator with cheery coffee-based song lyrics - in Swedish - in gothic script around the sides. 

The verse is the first two lines of a coffee song ("Kaffevisan" - you have to love a language that has a
word just for songs about coffee.) 

"Kaffetåren den bästa är
av alla jordiska drycker"

Or "coffee is the best of all earthly drinks".

I bought it together with a kettle ("En vaktad kittel blir aldrig bränd" - a watched kettle will never burn - huh, it's about caution not about impatience :) and we use them for camping and other travelling, for a comforting brew-up or the essential morning fuel or heating dishwater or whatever.


Yeah coffee songs. I know "Java Jive", the Manhattan Transfer version. And? Think I could do with more, would give me something to sing under my breath while I watch the percolator perc away over the camp stove at 5 a.m. of a Sunday morning. They're out there, I just need to learn them.

I thought the Kaffevisan on my coffee pot might be beyond me - the first version I found struck me as kinda weird. But this one looks more doable although it may require all the cheerfulness of a Nevada morning sky as well as quite a lot of ... well ... coffee. 

Must go and make another pot now.